In my last blog post, I talked about effective email communication and made the statement that the focus of every email should be on getting the lead on the phone. This may have been a little confusing as it was understood by a few of you to mean not to call until you have emailed. NOT THE CASE. Email is a measure taken as a means of contact when a number isn’t provided in the lead info or as a follow up after a call or voicemail. Email is also a way to supplement the amount of attempted contacts without inundating your lead with a large amount of phone calls. With that said, an email should never be considered a replacement for a good sales call. Calling web leads is vitally important to the success of the conversion process.

Be the First to Call Your Lead

Over 65% of leads that have been successfully converted are done on the first call. Why is this? Simple, homebuyers visit several websites when searching for a home. On average, a real estate web consumer will submit lead form on 3-5 of your competitor’s websites. The real estate consumer will more than likely respond to the first (sometimes the second) call put into them by agents responding to the inquiry. As for the third, fourth or fifth . . . they are simply out of luck as the consumer is tires of receiving calls relatively quickly and become non-responsive.

Call As Soon as Humanly Possible!

Waiting longer than 5 minutes to call a lead after a lead form/registration has been submitted has a 46% lower rate of qualification than those called in UNDER 5 minutes. In fact, the under 5 minute response vs. the over 30 minute response drops your chances of converting the lead 100 times! In addition to increasing your conversion ratio, it helps build rapport with the customer generating the idea that you will be responsive to their needs.

Weekends and After Hours Calling

The contact rate increases by almost 20% and the qualification rate increases by 30% when calling after hours. No big surprise here as most people that can afford to buy homes usually have jobs and are more often than not working from 9 to 5 Monday through Friday. Even if you were lucky enough to make contact with a lead during business hours there is frequently less focus and less time for a successful sales call as your lead is probably in the middle of something.

The Greatest Area of Opportunity

Because many agents won’t work with leads that are initially non-responsive, the ones that do have less competition for the attention of the lead.  The trick is to develop rapport and get the lead to interact with you before they are ready to go out and see homes.  The timing here is very important, because once the lead turns the corner and decides to make an appointment, he/she will go with the first agent they get on the phone and it then becomes a free-for-all.  I have found that it is at this very stage in the sales cycle that the lead starts jumping website to website and will sometimes be in contact with several agents at once, shrinking your window of opportunity.  If steps have been taken by you to develop rapport, this is less likely to happen.

How to know when they are ready

The reason I keep referring to the 90 to 120 period is because the greatest amount of leads become responsive soon after.  This doesn’t mean all leads will automatically become ready on day 121 as the non-response period can sometimes be up to a year or more (see graph above).  So how do you know when they are ready?  The short answer is, until they are in the car, you don’t.  With that said, there are some things that begin to surface in the lead profile that will help you make the best guess.

In the same way I analyze lead data at time of registration, I analyze my returning leads for readiness (buyer behavior).  The only real difference is that now the lead has some accumulated history I can look at.

• The first thing I consider is log in history.  If the lead initially has a login history of once or twice a month then jumps to several times a week or daily, it is time to step up the heat and apply a high-touch level of follow up (more about high-touch vs. low-touch in a later post).
• Secondly, I look at the “Saved Favorites” of the lead.  If the lead has recently begun to save home listings to their favorites, implement high-touch.  If the lead has been saving favorites all along, try to look at the types of homes the lead has been saving to see if a trend is developing.  Usually as a lead becomes more serious (demonstrating buyer behavior), he or she will go from saving all types homes (all areas and price ranges) to saving homes that are more specific to a set of criteria (tighter price ranges and areas within a certain vicinity).

There are lots of other little things that will start to throw up ‘buyer behavior’ flags as you become more familar with analyzing lead data.  I didn’t want to get into them because most of them are completely obvious (lead makes a call into the office, lead asks about taxes on a property, lead submits a mortgage requal form, etc.).  The key is to get to them before the more obvious indicators surface, because if it is painfully obvious to you, it is equally as obvious to the 5 other realtors who’s site they have been on.  Get to them fast and develop the rapport before your competitor does.

Bad News for Old School Sales People

Traditionally, sales people are taught to spend their time on “hot leads” (ready to look) and devalue customers that take longer to buy. While working with “hot leads” is probably a good idea for commission based sales people that are looking to efficiently allocate their time.  The bad news is that this approach is leaving a good amount of business on the table. The problem is that traditional sales people will only attempt follow up directly after registration and will abandon leads after a few attempts not knowing that 7 out of 10 are not ready to be contacted (in my office it was more like 9 out of 10).  In short, it is vitally important to contact the lead as quickly as possible but it is also important to understand that most of them just aren’t ready yet.

The right way to do it

When training my agents, I continuously used the words “prompt and persistent” when referring to the follow up of real estate web leads. Even though only 3 out of 10 will responsive, you risk losing even those 3 if you don’t get to that lead before they move on to a different website. Another thing that is very important to understand is that the remaining 7 ARE NOT POOR LEADS. They are simply not ready to be contacted. You as a sales person must figure out how to be in contact with them at the point where they are ready to be contacted. There is a systematic approach to recognizing the readiness of a lead using proper lead data analysis. I will go into details of this in Part 2 of my “Analyzing Lead Data” series.

Here are a few ways to analyze your leads to better prepare you for follow up.

1. Start with the easy stuff, look at how complete the inquiry/registration form is. Leads that take their time to fill out the form with full names, valid email addresses and phone numbers are generally more serious and better qualified.  This isn’t to say that the lead is no good if these elements don’t exist, but it helps to categorize the lead and make a better follow up plan.
2. Secondly, see if the email from a good ISP? In some cases, users will setup a free email address with hotmail or gmail to avoid being identified (which isn’t always a bad thing). Not always the case, but emails from a well known company or organization is usually a better qualified lead. i.e. matt.cutts@google.com vs ihaterealtors@hotmail.com.
3. How does the phone number look? Is it clearly a bogus number i.e 555-555-5555? Is it from an area code I recognize?  We do a lot of work with people from New York City, so 212 numbers are usually hot.
4. Are there user comment? Things like don’t contact me are a dead give away (although I have seen these converted too). On the other hand, specific comments made about the customer’s requirements are very important. I use them in my initial response later in the process.
5. Look at the leads user activity. A user tracking feature shows us every log in, every search and every page visited by the lead. From this, we can get a pretty good idea about what the lead is looking for (price range, area, etc.) and again I use this information in our follow up to develop rapport.

Now that I have analyzed the lead data, what do I do with it?

Better categorize the lead.

In my opinion, no lead is a bad lead unless the ALL the contact info is bad.  If I have a good email address, phone number or both . . . game on.  Understanding that every lead deserves a certain amount of attention, it is best to categorize the lead so I know where best to focus my attention as time allows. I have a follow up plan for every lead that comes in regardless of how serious they seem to be, as it is my idea that every lead will eventually buy (may not be true, but that is my mindset).

Setup a Drip Email Campaign.

Although this is the least effective of all follow up techniques, it is worth a try.  As long as you have a good unsubscribe feature it behooves you to set your leads up on a drip email campaign.  I usually have a different campaign for every category of lead that comes in.  After I analyze the lead, I set them up on the campaign that I think is most suited to the lead.  If by chance the lead stays subscribed, the branding and name recognition achieved by drip email will pay dividends in the end.

Setup a saved search (listing alert).

With a full lead analysis done and your user tracking feature in full gear, it is easy to set up a saved search that will send your lead new listings as they come on the market.  You know what the lead is looking for . . . now give it to them.  In my opinion this is the most effective way to get return visits.  If your lead isn’t ready to see homes now, they will be at one point, be sure to have your name in front of them when they become ready.

Make the call.

This is the most important part of the process.  Until human contact is made, the salesperson is regarded as just an email address and not much more.  The good news is that because of the great job you did analyzing the lead, you are armed and ready to make the call.  Before you make the call, try to pick out a piece of personal information from the lead profile like where they work (from the email address) or where they live (area code).  Try to make a connection with the lead using the information you have.  By the end of the call you will almost always know the full intention of the lead and can best place them in the correct category for follow up.

Hybrid Registration

There are a few versions of registration that I have seen to be effective. The most effective hybrid registration strategy (IMHO) allows the user to do unlimited searches without ever having to register. The searches of the unregistered user return the complete amount of listings making the results the same as if the user was registered. What makes unregistered search different is that each listing returned has a limited amount of detail. The limited amount of detail usually includes a single picture, price, bedrooms, bathrooms and acreage. Once the user registers, the full detail of the listing is revealed, displaying several pictures, virtual tours, school district, taxes, etc.

Why is this effective?

It is effective for a couple of reason. First off, it is good to develop trust and rapport with your users. A relationship of give and take is always the most effective (I give you something, you give me something). Giving the user nothing prior to registration usually ends up with the user hitting the back button and going to a different website. Secondly, allowing the user to do unlimited searches before asking them to register creates an investment made by the user. The user will sometimes search 3 and 4 times before getting the desired results. Once the user finds the perfect set of results (and looks to research the details of the listings), it is then when asking the user to register becomes most effective. The user is less likely to abandon the website at this point because he or she has dialed in the perfect search and would have to recreate the search at another website (it is easier to simply register at this point).

What to require in the registration form.

I found it to work best when the email address is the only thing that is required. The registration form should have other fields giving the user the opportunity to provide more but the email address is all I need. Any information given beyond the email address further qualifies the user as a lead but most of the information I need to know about the user is gathered by documenting the activity of the user. Knowing the detailed activity of your website users is the best way to learn about your prospective customer and increases the chance of converting the user to a lead. I will talk about user activity and tracking in a later blog.

It would be great if we as real estate agents didn’t have to require registration at all, unfortunately, we can’t afford to do that. The best thing we can do is treat our users with respect, protect their privacy and provide the best customer service we can.